


and if the night comes (and the night will come)

by Anonymous



Category: Arcade Spirits (Visual Novel)
Genre: 60/40 fluff to smut ratio, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Non-Binary Player Character, Other, Smut, Spoilers, and certain character moments, spoilers for the end of the game, the other characters are vaguely mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:07:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25963330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: 'Celebrating apparently meant eating tacos over the sink because plates were for losers and Queen Bee didn’t @!#?@! with losers, with sparkling cider in coffee mugs (she only had one wine glass which, like the plates, was already dirty) and my hair still wet from the shower, naked except for the towel around my waist, warm and safe.'What the hours after the confrontation with Deco Nami look like. Mostly fluffly, kind of smutty.
Relationships: Player/QueenBee (Arcade Spirits)
Kudos: 6
Collections: Anonymous





	and if the night comes (and the night will come)

**Author's Note:**

> The Player in this work is trans non-binary, AFAB, uses they/them pronouns and had top surgery, but no hormones, just in case you wanted to know. First time writing smut, so you probably shouldn't expect much.
> 
> I had an interesting time deciding between keeping with the style of the game and bleeping out the swears, or keeping the swears in cause this is porn anyways. And decided on the bleeping because I think it adds just that bit of style and does interesting things to the story since each reader can kind of imagine their own swears. 
> 
> (Also AS is fucking amazing, and there's gonna be a sequel, hell yeah)

It is the future year 20XX. My life is in free fall. And only in the sharp light of day will I be able to see where it lands and if it will break on impact. But right now it’s 3 in the morning, the quiet and still witching hour. If ever there was a time for the family curse to come around and slap me with a hit of cold reality, this would be the moment.

But the other shoe doesn’t drop. I stare at the clock as it ticks over to 3:14, still awake. Sighing, I roll carefully onto my back, trying not to squirm too much. Just because I can’t sleep, doesn’t mean Tanvi should be woken up. I listen to her breath softly, and try to copy it. The scent of my own body wash fills my nostrils, and I feel absurdly thankful that my skin still feels clean and warm from the shower.

Tanvi had whisked me away from Sue and Deco and the strange warehouse turned arcade cabinet maze/graveyard to celebrate our victory. Which was promptly ruined when I immediately dozed off in her car. Tanvi wasn’t even annoyed, just laughed loudly and told Iris to ‘make sure Juniper knows that El isn’t coming home tonight and to add the winking emoji.’

The salacious grin she gave me when I looked at her questioningly helped wake me up from my nap as Tanvi’s car rolled soothingly through the night towards her apartment. Every time my body threated to doze off at the still moments in front of red lights Tanvi would squeeze my knee and smile at me, and I’d blink myself awake for her again. If I wasn’t fast enough for Tanvi’s liking she’d scratch up my leg through my jeans, reminding me that she’d pulled off her fake nails, and lord I knew what that meant, and I’d shiver the sleep away.

When we had finally made it to Tanvi’s place I thwump-swang my way in and had practically collapsed onto her bed. Tanvi followed and poked me between the shoulder blades. “Uh-uh, nope, no way. You are not sleeping in my bed until you wash the Nami stink off you.”

I groaned into the bed, groping for the sheets to defiantly pull them around me with one hand, while Tanvi sighed at me. When she shook my shoulder, I stuck my tongue out at her, a move I knew would be both infuriating and inviting.

Tanvi didn’t take the obvious bait to kiss my insolence out of me, the way she’d done in the past, and I was both disappointed and strangely relieved. “C’mon El, take a shower and then we can celebrate your victory.”

Celebrating apparently meant eating tacos over the sink because plates were for losers and Queen Bee didn’t @!#?@! with losers, with sparkling cider in coffee mugs (she only had one wine glass which, like the plates, was already dirty) and my hair still wet from the shower, naked except for the towel around my waist, warm and safe. When my bad leg started shaking Tanvi helped me sit up on her counter, allowing me to steal kisses more easily.

The clock strikes 3:26 and I imagine I can still taste the tacos, even though I brushed my teeth hours ago, think I can still feel the steam of the shower. They are sensations that should relax me, but instead they only contribute to my insomnia, the phantom feelings reminding me that I’m useless at relaxing, that I’m wasting all these good feelings on someone like me, that I can’t even fall asleep properly. 

In the dim light I examine Tanvi’s apartment, hoping to distract myself by finding some new detail I have not yet mapped. Juniper is great, the sister I never had, but I figure even she doesn’t want to know what the physical side of Tanvi and my relationship is like, so often we end up at her apartment. Despite that, I find that I still struggle to picture it. Juniper teases me endlessly about that.

It’s more bare bones than I would’ve expected, filled mostly with essentials, and a few scattered books, knick-knacks and framed posters. When I asked her about it, Tanvi had said most of her things were with her parents. The apartment was never meant to be long term (especially now, with the planned 4HK America House). It gives it a sophisticated, if lonely air.

My apartment is far more lived in and what Juniper and I affectionately refer to as ‘our boys college dorm’ even though neither of us are boys or in college. A wild scattering of different pride flags, posters hung up with tack, piles of Juniper’s artwork, and ridiculous and eclectic art pieces and knick-knacks cover most surfaces. The Moopy doll the guys won for me at the beach sits on the shoulders of an inflatable alien, who lives beside the tasteful painting Juniper bought during the trip.

My eyes catch a part of the empty wall of Tanvi’s place, slightly darker than the rest. Is it a stain or a shadow? Perhaps my over tired eyes playing tricks in the low light. The dark seems to move, and I rub them until I see static.

The static only succeeds in making me more aware of all the things keeping me up. Like being cold. I shiver a little and consider whether I want to get up and put pyjama pants on over my boxer briefs.

“It’s so cute how you wear underwear to bed,” Tanvi had laughed at me earlier, preferring to sleep in the nude.

“My butt gets cold,” was all I’d been able to offer in justification, ducking my head and rubbing at my neck, but smiling.

We didn’t end up having sex. Tacos, a hot shower and evening painkillers kicked in very quickly, and I had almost fallen forward off the counter, swooning with exhaustion.

The clock ticks 3:37, and I figure if I’m not asleep by now, I won’t be any time soon. I roll over to try and grab my phone and crutches. Iris doesn’t need sleep, and I won’t feel bad tossing and turning on the couch with no one else to wake up.

“You are not @!#?@!ing sleeping on the couch with a god@!#?@! bullet hole in your leg, El.” Tanvi’s tone freezes my hand midair. A cold shiver rolls down my spine.

I turn around to see her glaring at me, sitting up, arms crossed, and obviously pissed.

“I didn’t want to wake you.” The words drop awkwardly out of my mouth and I can see how unimpressed Tanvi is by them. I’m pretty unimpressed too, to be honest.

“Too late now.” The edge in her voice stings.

I fiddle with the comforter awkwardly, feeling a drop of sweat bead between my shoulders and roll down to my lower back. We’re both pretty bad at this, I suppose. A decade and a half of settling, of accepting the worst from life is a hard habit to break. Should I really have just woken up Tanvi though? I can understand why she’s angry, how complicated my sneaking off to the couch would make things, what it implies.

After all it’s barely been a few days since I got shot, and she confessed how much I really mean to her. She’s used to a little bit of distance, one layer of compartmentalization to keep her from getting hurt. And yet when she offered to break down that wall for me, well, I said how much I loved her, and that was true, I’m the sappy one in the relationship, so uncool and over emotional I sometimes wonder how we ended up together. (You’re gutsy too! Not just kindly! I hear Iris repeat in my head.) Running away to the couch means reaffirming that distance without discussion or prompting. It assumes.

Tanvi throws me a bone when the awkward tension started getting far too thick. Three am was too early (or too late, perhaps, depending on who you ask) to have a fight, but I suspected in the morning we’d be having a discussion about asking for help and my inability there in. _You’re not some action hero._ Which meant not only should I not jump in front of bullets, I shouldn’t do the whole brooding, ‘I’m fine and not in pain thing’. I know this, have gone to therapy for this. And yet. Thought and action are two very different things.

Tanvi sighs and gives up being mad at me for the moment. She lifts the comforter closest to her, holding out her arm. “Can’t sleep?” 

I scootch over, in a not very dignified manner, and let myself fall into her, leaning awkwardly against her side and partly on her arm. I immediately relax a little from the skin to skin contact. My face heats up – Tanvi’s taller than me, and I tuck my head under her chin, trying to keep my eyes respectfully averted from her breasts (even though I know she would roll her eyes at that. “You’ve seen them before, El.”)

Answering her is the distraction I need. “Everything hurts, Tanvi.” Tears well up and a thick lump forms in my throat. I will myself not to cry because I don’t want to feel any more childish than I already do.

It doesn’t work. I can’t help crying as I keep talking, the tears slow and wet down my cheeks. “The bullet hole hurts, and my good leg hurts because I’m putting extra weight on it, and my arms hurt from the crutches and I can’t take any more @!#?@!ing painkillers for three more god@!#?@! hours.”

I wipe at my eyes with the back of my hand, trying to calm my ragged breath. “I’m exhausted, but my brain just won’t stop screaming at me. I can’t stop thinking. My body wants me to sleep but my mind just won’t let me.”

I can feel Tanvi grin. Before I even have the chance to think she reaches her arm around my back, dragging me to be properly side to side with her, and digs her long fingers into the muscle of my thigh, right above the bullet hole. I can feel my skin heat up everywhere it touches hers, thigh to thigh, the swell of her breast soft against my scarred chest. There’s no point in pretending it doesn’t feel good and I let out a long whimper as she massages the tightness in my leg away.

“Tell me what’s keeping you up, El.” Tanvi demands as she massages her way up to my knee and back again, careful to turn her touch delicate when it nears the neat stitches of my still healing wound.

I try to slow my breathing down and relax a little; getting hysterical will just make me feel worse. Matching my breaths to the slow up and down motions Tanvi is making on my leg helps to ground and center me and then I can speak.

“I think I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop. There’s always something.” I groan as Tanvi’s long fingers find a knot, deep in the muscle. “Sue could still change her mind back, then her dad will crush me like an ant, probably press assault charges after all for punching him in the face, I’ll get to watch Arcade Spirits languish and die slowly, as my dreams slip through my fingers, and then I’ll be poor again and have to eat pizza bagels for every meal.”

It hurts to hear myself sound so certain and resigned, but I can’t help it. The thoughts won’t stop swirling, over and over, no matter how much I tell myself that they’re irrational and wrong. Saying them out loud diminishes their power over me, but not by much.

“I think I could be a good sugar daddy,” Tanvi suggests playfully, stopping her massage to run one finger up my thigh. I’m glad for my boxer briefs in that moments, glad she can’t feel the obvious goosepimples she’s raising on my skin. I look at her in confusion when her words finally sink in.

She pauses for a moment, takes a breath like she’s gathering her courage and says, low and careful and tender, “Once I become the best player in 4HK and they start paying me the big bucks, I can take care of you.”

And that gets me going. The sweet admission does more to turn me on than all the provocative touches Tanvi is making as she returns to the massage, each pass getting closer and closer to the ‘suggestive’ territory of my inner thighs. I huff out a subdued breath. My cheeks are on fire.

“Can I have a pony then?” My joking tone is washed out by the increasing tempo of my breathing. An increase that is not from my anxiety. 

Tanvi ignores the joke, forging ahead with the sentimentality that I’m getting drunk on, and moves her hand up to my stomach, hooking her arm around me as she pulls me into her lap, back to front. She moves her hand to my chest, tracing the top surgery scars, while the other moves to my good leg and massages the tension out there. A moan slips out, tears of relief pricking at my eyes as her long fingers grind out the knots in my aching muscles.

Tanvi leans forward, and I feel her breasts press against my back, nipples pebbled and obvious. It is easier for her to say what comes next, easier for me to hear and bear it, when we aren’t facing each other, when she can whisper it into my ear and then nip the lobe, wash out the burning sentiment with physical pleasure.

“But honestly, I don’t think you’ll need it. You’re good at talking to people, El. You’re kind. You’re a god@!#?@! rock star. And Sue saw that. Sometimes things are just good and work out and you get to enjoy them.”

Dimly I’m aware of my anxiety untangling itself just a little, but even so, if I tried to sleep now the anxiety loop would just start again. I force myself to nod. It’s true, I know, sometimes things just work out. If I could just let my anxiety know that, too.

“You get to enjoy… this.” Tanvi continues, dipping her hand to the center of my underwear.

I bite my lip and try not to buck into her hand, realizing for the first time how wet and wanting I am. My underwear is soaked and there’s no way Tanvi can’t feel it. I can’t see her, but I know she’s smirking. Sometimes you can’t rationalize your anxiety away, but you can distract from it, at least for a little while, until you’re ready to try rationalizing again. And Tanvi is very, very good at being distracting.

A growl escapes my lips, and Tanvi holds my hips down with one hand as I grind into her other. She doesn’t move, content to let me shamelessly @!#?@! myself. The swears drop from my lips with ease, a few @!#?@! and one or two dirtier words. When my gut begins to coil tightly, I force myself to slow, panting and squirming in her arms, close but unsatisfied. When I stop completely, she moves her hand, wiping it on the sheets and then rests it comfortingly on my stomach, concerned.

I don’t want to stop, just kiss the smirk off her face. Craning my neck and leaning back, I catch her open mouth, pushing away whatever worries she had before she can articulate them. It isn’t the most comfortable of kisses, but it does the job. We kiss slowly and she touches my chest again. It’s not where I need her hands to be, but it still feels nice.

Tanvi moves to deepen the kiss and I don’t stop her, neck twinging slightly. When she bites my lower lip I take that as my cue to move, rotating my shoulders, then my hips, and finally kneeling facing her. One overheated palm finds Tanvi’s hip and I tangle the other into her hair. I’m panting when she pulls away, vaguely aware of pain in my bad leg, but I’m too enthralled to properly notice or care.

Tanvi doesn’t either. At first. I’m shamelessly eye @!#?@!ing her, and I catch her gaze, see her seeing me, and feel my underwear get even wetter, when she laughs before returning the favor. I go to move my hand up to her breast, and really get this foreplay started, when Tanvi, following the line of my body down, snaps her eyes back up to mine, and takes my wrist; soft, careful, deliberate.

I catch the look Tanvi is giving me. It’s halfway pissed. The kind of mad that’s because there’s too many other emotions to be anything but. “El, remind me again what the @!#?@! the doctor said about your leg?”

I feel it then, an angry throbbing pain, deep in the muscle of my thigh. With it the anxiety comes rushing back. I chew on my left cheek as I suck air into my mouth, stalling. Only for a moment though. The bullet hole twinges hard, and pain radiates down both my legs, though it is much duller in my good leg.

“Don’t kneel on or curl your legs too much.” I mutter, having memorized the exact intonation the doctor had used when he explained my limitations and capabilities while healing. Honestly, I knew better, and that’s what really has Tanvi mad. I’m still healing, and yet, trying to push myself too far.

Uncurling my legs provides instant, sudden relief. The ghost of the pain still lingers, but as I spread my legs out and move to sit on my butt again, most of it washes away. It takes the emotional pain with it too.

I cry again, and Tanvi let’s me, making circles on my wrist with her fingernail. I’m being an idiot; falling back into old patterns, before getting shot, before the grand opening of Arcade Spirits, letting stress eat at me and inform my decisions.

I feel floaty, disconnected from my body and its pain. I breath again; laugh-cry-hiccup my way through processing my feelings. Right. We can talk about this, calmly and rationally. Tanvi and I love each other.

“It’s just so @!#?@! frustrating!” I punch my free hand into the bed, with force that wouldn’t even damage a fly.

First it had been the busyness, the stress of the grand opening. Normally, I’d found Tanvi was good at helping me work that stress out, but things had been too quick and strange, and still healing from the depressive distance I had let us fall into after Francine’s death. We hadn’t had sex in awhile, and now the moment we both wanted to, my body was too busted up to do what I wanted.

I struggle to articulate all this. 

Tanvi puts her hands on my knees, meeting my eyes in the semi-dark and smiling. It knocks the wind out of me, this love and intimacy. Despite this sudden roadblock, in the moment I can’t regret getting shot.

I smile, sighing out my feelings as I speak, breathless and whispering, “I guess I was just hoping this one thing would be easy, would just go exactly the way I wanted it to, now that it was happening. I – imagined something different when you said I get to enjoy this. I wish things were simpler, easier, sometimes.”

“I mean, if you don’t want me to get you off,” Tanvi trails off suggestively. The grin she flashes me is predatory, absolute assurance that she knows exactly what I want.

“I do!” I say it maybe too loud, desperate and needy. The rest of my words squeak out. “It’s just…” I don’t finish the sentence, taking a moment to think.

“But it’s not really fair if I’m the only one who gets off, is it?” I ask lamely.

Tanvi purses her lips in an expression I know all too well. We are definitely having an uncomfortable talk in the morning about my hero complex.

Tanvi grabs my chin, pulling my head up to make long, firm eye contact. I gulp hard, wiggling my toes to keep from squirming away. The expression on Tanvi’s face is intimately familiar to me, most often made when she’s flying through games of FoD, confidence thundering across her face, her gaze quicksilver lightning. Tanvi is a queen, and she will not hesitate to remind me when I’m being silly and have forgotten that fact.

When she speaks, it is with total confidence, in a low tenor that goes straight to my core, “It’s okay to be selfish and think of your own pleasure for once, El. Let someone else take care of you. C’mon where’s my @!#?@!ing fighter who refused to let me go when I was being a @!#?@! idiot about my feelings?”

Something swells in my chest. It pushes out the anxiety, the depression, the screaming about the curse and bubbles up into a bark of a laugh. A few tears prick at the corner of my eyes, but there’s no emotion attached to them, just the last release of stress from my body. I bring my hands on top of Tanvi’s, pulling them away from my chin, and intertwine our fingers.

“QueenBee, @!#?@! me.”

“Of course, El.”

My commanding tone is undercut somewhat by the automatic please that slips out after Tanvi agrees, but even in the dim light of her room I can see that it makes her blush more than any swearing could.

Before I even manage to scramble back to where we were before, Tanvi has her mouth on my neck, kissing a hickey there that will be hard to cover with my hoodie. I groan out long and low, pliant muscles yielding easily to Tanvi’s hands. She can push me wherever she wants. We end up back to front again as she moves to kiss the other side of my neck and toys with the waistband of my underwear. I can feel the ghost of her nails through the elastic, which she traces over and over.

With her other hand she drags her nails down my chest, flicking one of my nipples. That, I can feel. Tanvi’s hands are warm, rough with callouses from hours and hours of Fists of Discomfort.

“I’m good with my hands,” she’d flirted the first time we did this, and I burn as I think of it. She certainly is. My scars itch from my pent up energy, and I squirm a little more with every pass Tanvi makes. There’s a bright bruise forming at the crook of my neck, and Tanvi moves higher, to extend it up my neck, past the point where I could hide it.

I don’t really need these touches, these flaring lines of heat down my chest and at the elastic of my soaked boxer briefs; we’re past the need for foreplay at this point. Tingles spread throughout my body, past my toes, to the crown of my head, and I bite my lip because the touches are so soft, too soft, winding up my sensitivity almost to the point of pain.

But Tanvi is a benevolent Queen. Just when I think the soft touch of her nails on my scars is going to ruin me, she finally slips her hand into my underwear and thumbs my clit _hard._

My voice _cracks_. “@!#?@!.”

Tanvi laughs roughly, soothing the hickeys on my neck with soft kisses. She softens her touches to match, circling my entrance, teasing me again. My one hand fists in the bed sheets, twisting the fabric so hard it pulls from the bed.

My other hand I place over Tanvi’s, trying to communicate what I want without words – her fingers, _inside_. I don’t even have to say please, and Tanvi obliges, slipping one finger in to her knuckle. I grind down to meet her, a breathy moan escaping my lips, as Tanvi cards her other hand through my short hair.

It’s good, so good, and I let out a long sigh, spreading my legs further apart. I take Tanvi’s other hand in my own, and kiss the knuckles between moans, make my way up overheated skin, turn only my shoulders until I can just kiss her again.

“More, please,” I murmur out. A second finger follows the first. A flood of wetness follows that.

“Good boy,” Tanvi praises, too busy teasing to kiss me with tongue.

I whimper at the praise; I am not a boy, but there is no equivalent that is very sexy, and I prefer it over girl.

Soon, it becomes difficult to kiss Tanvi with just my shoulders turned and my lower body follows the natural twist of my spine, Tanvi’s long fingers hitting in an entirely new way from that angle. I can feel myself getting close.

I want to bite my hand, or my lips until they bleed to keep from crying out, but Tanvi doesn’t let me, holding my wrists tight with one hand when she sees me about to try, kisses forgotten, laser focused on getting me off. She crooks her fingers, hitting my sweet spot and I half scream, half moan, “Tanvi, Tanvi, @!#?@!. I’m – @!#?@!” 

Fleeting sympathy for the neighbors hearing and worry that’ll they’ll knock on Tanvi’s door in anger trickles into my mind, offering a single steady moment of good, clean thoughts. They are just as quickly blown out again. Trying deliriously to hold onto that moment of reprieve to prevent from coming is futile because Tanvi notices.

“You’re doing so good, you’re so wet, El. You want it so @!#?@!ing badly, don’t you?”

I twist down onto her fingers, hard and slick, as she rubs my clit again. I don’t have time to appreciate the edge I’m on, to try and ride out the waves of pleasure crashing through me any longer. Three short hard strokes and I’m crashing over the edge. 

My orgasm is shattering. I feel it in my chest, and my legs. The sound that slips out of my mouth is ragged, hoarse and satisfied and sublime. 

I’m not even fully down from my orgasm when Tanvi licks her fingers off, stretches, throws her arm around my waist and lies down on her side, facing me, to sleep again. The smirk on her face drips with satisfaction, Tanvi almost more pleased than I am. “Goodnight, El.”

“Goodnight,” I manage to sigh out, voice shaky and raspy, blown out from good sex.

I roll bonelessly to my side, managing to crack an eye open to observe Tanvi. She’s not really asleep, her chest rising too fast in a mere facsimile of slumber. I am not surprised by one last teasing gesture. Tanvi notices me noticing her plot and leans forward to kiss my nose, pull me closer to her body, whisper an ‘I love you’ in my ear. I say it back and let the good feelings fill up my brain and body where once only my anxiety lay.

Sated, I curl myself under Tanvi’s chin, flush with exhaustion and love, thrumming with the aftershocks of my release, anxiety and depression melted away, at least for the night. I don’t remember falling asleep, but it is dreamless and wonderfully heavy. I wake up too early, but don’t feel tired, unfrightened of falling, of the knife’s edge I’m perched on, ready to find out what will happen to my arcade and the people whose dreams depend on it.

**Author's Note:**

> lol, might orphan this later depending on how I feel about it. Anyways, hope you enjoyed, this may be submitted anonymously, but I can still get comments and love to read them!


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